Ugarte is the new online literary journal to follow. The maiden issue is packed with interesting writing. There's an essay on Roberto Bolaño in El Salvador and interviews with Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya and New Directions President Barbara Epler.
The editors traced the journal's inception to a Bolaño story, "Sensini".
The five founding editors of Ugarte met in the fall of 2010 at Eugene Lang College in a class on the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, taught by Indian novelist and literary critic, Siddhartha Deb. Ugarte takes its name from “Sensini,” a short story written by Bolaño in which a young writer corresponds with an elder, cultish author by the name of Louis Antonio Sensini.
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Throughout the class Roberto Bolaño, in his capacity as an enfant terrible of modern literature, gradually began to represent, for many of us, the exact qualities our increasingly complacent literary culture otherwise seems intent on abandoning: progressivism, internationalism, combativeness.
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In lieu of undergraduate fiction and poetry we have emphasized the critical essay, aimed to bring attention to writers in all corners of the world whose work we feel is of exceptional merit, as well as to cast a skeptical glance at those groups and individuals who simply get away with too much. (The New Yorker 20 under 40, say.) We intend furthermore to bring you insightful and thought-provoking interviews with some of the most exciting writers on the planet, in an effort to help stimulate the global literary conversation.
http://ugartemag.com/?page_id=17
